I’m broadly in sympathy with what the First Minister wants to see achieved at the end of the day, but I do think that this is making a mountain out of a molehill. I find it quite extraordinary that the leader of Plaid Cymru should be talking about the powers of this Assembly being constrained or reduced. The powers that we are talking about here we don’t currently enjoy, and there was no complaint whatsoever from Plaid Cymru or most of the Labour Party, the SNP, and certainly not the Liberals, when powers that used to reside in the popularly elected United Kingdom Parliament were sent to Brussels to be decided upon by unelected commissioners, over whose power there is very little democratic control at all. So, what Brexit for me is all about, and has always been about, is actually the recovery of democratic control over technocratic decisions that are taken by people whom you very often can’t even name, let alone elect or dismiss.

So, we should embrace this as a reinvigoration of parliaments, this one included. And, yes, I strongly agree with the First Minister that all the powers that currently reside within our devolved areas, but currently reside in Brussels, should come to the Welsh Government and to this Assembly. I’ve said that many times here, and he’ll have my strong support for ensuring that that does happen. But there is, of course, in other parties, explicitly Plaid Cymru and the Liberals, and, indeed, the SNP as well, a policy of wanting to reverse the entire Brexit process. And to create a new weapon whereby this could be frustrated, despite the outcome of the referendum in June last year, is, for me, completely unacceptable. Although I don’t think that Theresa May has handled relations with the devolved administrations in a very sensible way, and I agree with the First Minister that there has been too much of a dictatorial attitude and not enough attempt to engage and persuade, I don’t think that it’s worth paying the price that we might have to pay if we were to engage in a kind of trench warfare in Parliament over the process by means of which we recover powers that currently we don’t have. So, I don’t see this is in any way an assault upon the devolution process.

In the statement, the First Minister referred to the exclusion of the charter of fundamental rights. I well remember, in the year 2000, when this was being discussed, the Blair Government at the time said that it would veto any attempt to legislate for that, and Keith Vaz, of course, very famously said it had no more legal power than a copy of the ‘Beano’. And yet, now, this is being elevated to something of supreme importance. And, yes, I understand why Members say that things like employment rights are vitally important, but, at the end of the day, if we believe in democracy, we have to accept that parliaments ought to have the right to do things that we don’t like. We may not think they’re very sensible to do so, but, ultimately, the test is: can you get the people at the ballot box to support you in your policies? It’s not, I think, for judges or civil servants, or, indeed, corpuses of law, to remove from the people their power to decide what legislative changes should or should not take place, and I believe that the attempt, described by the leader of Plaid Cymru a moment ago, to try to mark out areas of law that can never be changed, because they become fundamental, is quite contrary to the entire democratic process. So, I’d say to the First Minister that, yes, I do sympathise with him in what he has said. I think he’s quite right, actually, on the objective, but I am very wary about the means whereby he seeks to obtain that objective, and so we will look very carefully at these amendments before we decide whether we’ll support them or not.